The Greatest Trick

2006/01/26

In it he's talking about having seen the movie The Usual Suspects
where Kevin Spacey's character make a comment about the devil's
greatest trick is making people believe he didn't exist. Then Mr.
Carraro carries this over to architecture:

Without entering in any of the religious aspect of this
sentence, it hit me that maybe one of the greatest trick that an
architect could do is to make the business believe that technology does
not exist.

Think about it, making technology so pervasive, so transparent, so
interwoven into the business processes or business in general that one
could not separate the business from IT.

Instead of aligning IT to business, how about aspiring to make business and IT non dissociable?

I'm going to take a slightly different twist. What if we were able
to make database perform so well that the end user never even thought
about the fact the database existed. I realize how hard this is to do.
After all, this goes beyond just DBAs but also to developers as they
put together their applications. However, it's a goal to shoot for.
Like anything else in infrastructure, people only tend to notice
something when it isn't working. Slow query times is one such category
of this. In order to do this, though, that means sound database design
from the start. That's a tall order for any organization. But that
should be the goal.